[j-nsp] Suggestions for Edge/Peering Router..

[Saku Ytti]

On Thu, 19 Sep 2019 at 01:52, Jason Lixfeld <jason-jnsp at lixfeld.ca> wrote:

> Don’t get me wrong, Cisco definitely owns their share of BS, but they seem to be predictable in how they are going to screw you.  Juniper will screw you, but how they are going to screw you seems to be predictably unpredictable.

I have to say this is entirely subjective and my subjective experience
is rather different. But it is to be expected, if we would have very
homogenous view on which vendor is superior, competing vendors would
disappear.

My subjective views where JNPR shines compared to market

a) model driven configuration since day1, this is a big thing, much
bigger than YANG or Netconf or whatever other automation hype is going
on. Junos doesn't actively resist automation.
b) Trio is the only platform I know how to protect control-plane so
that I don't know how to break it
c) very debuggable (CSCO is good too here, this is more complaint to
Other Options).
d) I will echo your sentiment about complexity and agree to it, junos
gives a lot of power to the operator, where CSCO might have some
specific feature they support, have a name for, and have single line
config, JNPR doesn't have anything, because the feature has always
been possible due to the inherent flexibility and expressiveness of
the system. Some particular examples, BGP GTSM, VRF source selection,
egress-acl-at-ingress, there are plenty of examples in this, but can
be very involved to get right.

I don't have any dislike for CSCO, I'm sure you can support your
business case with both vendors, or Nokia or Huawei. Subjectively for
SP role, I think Nokia and Huawei have best port/chassis options. I
think Juniper has best NPU and best NOS on the market. For SP role
particularly, from the big names, today I think CSCO has least
attractive portfolio, but this is normal timing related thing, at some
point any vendor is behind, once they release some new generation
stuff they'll move ahead and start regressing. I believe ANET has best
practices in developing software and considering how young they are on
SP market, it's quite impressive where they are.

-- 
  ++ytti